This is ecological disorder of a very radical kind and it has changed the ecology of influenza and the conditions under which animal diseases pass to humans. It’s also happened at a time when public health in much of the urban Third World has declined. One of the consequences of structural adjustment in the 1980s was to force hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, and public-health workers to emigrate, leaving Kenya or the Philippines to work in England or Italy.

This is a formula for biological disaster and avian flu is the second pandemic of globalization. It’s very clear now that HIV AIDS emerged at least partially through the bush-meat trade, as West Africans were forced to turn to bush meat because European factory ships were vacuuming up all the fish in the Gulf of Guinea, the major traditional source of protein in urban diets. There’s also a hypothesis, with a lot of circumstantial evidence, that HIV probably reached a critical mass in Kinshasha [in the Congo], a great city that is the ultimate current example of what happens after the state collapses or withdraws.

So HIV, avian flu, SARS — another disease that emerged from the bush-meat trade, this time in the cities of southern China, and spread around the world with frightening speed. This is the future of disease…

The central government admitted Tuesday that it may have mishandled the outbreak after it became known local authorities overlooked the infection during an on-site inspection in late March.

"There may have been certain problems in terms of having done everything we could to prevent the expansion," Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said. "The government will be united in working to avert further expansion of the infections, especially so people in the Kyushu area will feel safe."

I have a hunch that most calves are produced by artificial insemination. It’s like a little cottage industry, you stumble on little barns of 3 to 5 cows all over the place. Raising calves to supply meat suppliers provides some cash revenue to small-scale farmers. "A pig typically sells for about ¥35,000 and a cow for ¥500,000 to ¥1 million". I wonder about the genetic similarity and shared vulnerability of Japan’s fat-laced ‘Wagyu’ cows.

Miyazaki also plays a significant role in supplying high-quality "wagyu" beef because farmers in Matsuzaka, Mie Prefecture, and other places buy calves from Miyazaki to breed them. Matsuzaka beef is considered the highest quality beef in Japan.

According to statistics compiled by the National Livestock Breeding Center, 84,059 "kuroge" (black hair) wagyu were born in Miyazaki in the year that ended in March 2009, accounting for 14.8 percent of that type of cow born in Japan. Kuroge wagyu is the most tender of all beef and thus the most popular in Japan.